Do Standing Ovations at Film Festivals Mean Anything? The Town Investigates.

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1:11Anne Rice's The Vampire Lestat. All new Sundays at 9, exclusively on AMC and AMC+. Stream now. It is Thursday, October 23rd. I was at the opening night of the AFI Festival at the Chinese last night. the Bruce Springsteen movie. When the credits rolled, there was applause, but no standing ovation. That only happened when Bruce came out and played a couple songs, which was excellent. AFI is in stark contrast to what I've been railing against for the past couple of years, not just the proliferation of these performative standing ovations at film festivals, some of them lasting 10, 15, 20 minutes at a time, but the breathless media coverage of these ovations, as if they somehow matter and give some indication of the quality or popularity of the films.

1:55The overzealous response to a film at Cannes or Venice, that's been a thing as long as I've been going to film festivals. It goes back decades, at least. And I get it. It's all about a celebration designed to promote moviemaking. It's why we're all here. It's why everyone plays along. But there used to be a quirk of the European audience. And in the social media age, they've kind of turned into a weird performance art. I've sat through movies that got long-standing ovations and were legitimately terrible. and it really does a disservice to the audience when they're anointed as excellent based on some standing ovation that is only there because of a big star or filmmaker in the room.

2:32Or at least that's my opinion. I've always wondered if there's any data to support my theory that festival ovations have no correlation with the ultimate response to or performance of a movie. And now there is. Turns out a researcher in the UK named Stephen Follows. He's a consultant that does tons of film-related reports and contributes to the Guinness Records. He's been tracking this stuff. And he put out some great charts on his sub stack. So I wanted to have him on the show to answer my questions. Have standing ovations gotten worse? Which festival generates the biggest ovations? Which media outlets exaggerate the lengths to the most degree to generate clicks?

3:10And ultimately, do these film festival standing ovations mean anything? Today, it's a very important investigation. The town investigates. From The Ringer and Puck, I'm Matt Belenian. and this is the town.

3:26Okay, we are here with Stephen Follows, who's a film data analyst, consultant, very deep into the numbers on very important topics, and also topics like this one. Welcome, Stephen. Thank you very much. I think all topics are equally as important, so they're as important as they are to you. Well, the rigor with which you approach this topic was pretty stunning to me. I linked to it in my Puck newsletter, your data analysis of standing ovations at film festivals. And you looked at 500 of them across the world's biggest festivals with a primary focus on the big five. Berlin, Toronto, Sundance, Venice, and Cannes.

4:12And this is, as you know, a topic that I come back to because I find it absolutely ridiculous that these ovations, which are driven by such disparate reasons, everything from who the filmmaker is to whether they are juicing up the ovation by like having others join in amongst the talent and like try to get the ovation to continue longer. All of it produces these articles that appear at festivals and people think that because the ovation is 15 minutes, that it's actually a good movie. And someone like me, who is sitting in that movie, often will be like, what is this? That is not correlative with the movie that I just saw.

4:59So let's see what the data borns out for this, okay? So is it true that standing ovations are on the rise at the five major film festivals? Oh, absolutely. Yeah, they really are. I mean, like, there were some in the previous century, but they were usually about, like, someone's work. Like, C.O. G.O. Leone's work, like Once Upon a Time in America got a 15-minute ovation in 1984 at Cannes. But that was probably more about his body of work. But also, we talk about ovations, but quite often it's about how long people are on their feet making noise. So sometimes things like Taxi Driver, Pulp Fiction, they were jeered as well as clapped.

5:37Right. And that counts as an ovation a lot, yeah. Well, yeah, nowadays it might. But yeah, so, like, in the previous century, they were sporadic, right? But from around like 2000, we started to see like maybe five, 10 films a year would have like something in the press or in a trivia column about their ovation. But it was really around the 2010s that it just boomed to be like 20, 30, 40 films a year would have one. And then in the 2020s, it's even more than that. So last year in 2024, it was almost 60 different films. And like you said, it's only at these top five festivals and they don't often play the same movies.

6:09So we're not talking about many movies that had some reporting in the major film trade press that there was an ovation. Okay, so that brings up a lot of things because obviously what happened in the 2010s is social media came around. And the fact that the ovations at these festivals could then go viral via video and tweets and all of the other things, I think people got wise to that and they started being more performative than they might have been in the past. Do you agree with that? Yeah, I think, I mean, it's a mix between this happening more and being reported more. And it's obviously symbiotic because like you said, they're jeering them up, but also they want to reward that particular film and they know this is now a way of doing it.

6:52And then people like comment on it more. And I mean, this whole thing, the reason I studied all this was that I was at the Zurich Film Festival giving a keynote a couple of weeks ago. And there was a panel before me that had the head of Toronto and the head of Berlin and a few other big, huge names with the festivals. And the topic came up and they all sort of said, look, they're not really that meaningful, but they're interesting. We like the buzz, you know. And Tricia, who runs Berlin, said, oh, you know, someone should, in fact, Stephen should study this about the correlation. And so it is sort of in the air.

7:20Now, that evening, I was at a dinner for the festival for the speakers and stuff. And I will not say which outlet it was, but someone who sat next to was in PR and they were sitting opposite someone who works in one of the major trade publications. And he said, oh, yeah, about that topic, that's these guys' fault. And these guys from this particular outlet look quite sheepish. And they were like, yeah, Yeah, they decided to cover it. Wait, wait, wait. Tell us which one. Listen, I ran the Hollywood Reporter, so I am not, I am complicit in this. I presided over the outlet that was doing this, one of the major outlets that was doing this in the 2010s.

7:52So I am fully ready to have this discussion. And I will tell you why we started doing it because it got picked up. You're looking for traffic. And if you can say controversial Cannes movie got a 10, 20 minute standing ovation, All the aggregators would pick it up. Drudge Report would pick it up. That's where this started. 100%. I'm not going to say which publication it is. Otherwise, I may not get invited back to the fondue dinner. But I will tell you that there is a brilliant article in The Hollywood Reporter, which may have been from you. I don't know who wrote it. The headline is, standing ovations are getting ridiculous.

8:26Who's to blame? Okay, it's us. That is a whole story and a headline. And it wasn't just us. Deadline is the worst. And we'll get into who exaggerates the length the most. but it is the trade press. The trade press, they're at all of these events, and they are trying to get traffic and distinguish themselves from the others. And the way you do that is to report on some ecstatic response to a movie at a festival. Well, you've got to say something, haven't you? You've got the review of the movie, but that might be embargoed. It's a bit more protected. You can't say the premiere happened because that's not news.

9:02And yet there isn't really a news hook. And so if there's something different about it, and you've written about it before, then I kind of get it. It's not like any individual journalist is trying to do this nefariously. They've got a wild copy, right? Right. All the incentives are aligned. So you're saying that the number of reported standing ovations at the five major festivals have reached an all-time high. And that's according to 2024 data. Yeah, that's the number of films that had them. Although it's interesting, what's actually happened since around 2010 is that the average length of the ovations at Cannes has actually started to reduce.

9:35Oh, interesting. Yeah, not by a huge amount. I mean, so the high point was 2011 when the average was about 15 minutes, which is an internally long period of time to be banging your hands together, wearing a tux, wanting to be somewhere else. Well, it ebbs and flows. It goes up and down. And then someone else will stand up. And then the director will point at the other one and point at someone new who stands up. They know how to milk this. Yeah, so that was the high point, 2011. And then now it's sort of settled down to an average of seven, eight minutes. I mean, averages are complicated because there's only a small number of films anyway.

10:07I mean, there's only 20-odd films that can each year anyway. There's no referee that is out there with a stopwatch saying the official time for this is, you know, it's all based on media reporting of what the ovation is. Exactly. And there's no incentive, as you said, to get it accurate or anything like that. Right. Except people like me who make fun of the outlets that exaggerate. Yeah, I mean, I don't want to be rude about the film trade press, but it's not news. Like, it's not hard news, is it? Like, let's be honest. Well, news is a subjective topic. And I've had this argument with many people where I say, just stop.

10:43Stop giving a number. You can say warmly received. You can say enthusiastic. Just stop giving a number. And the number is the thing that travels and gets picked up by drudge. So that's what they do. Yeah, I mean, yeah, that's what we do. I mean, certainly as an analyst, I got to be quite careful not to turn things into numbers because I like numbers and they give such pleasing answers. It doesn't mean they're correct. And honestly, at these parties, at the after party, they look. The filmmakers look. And everybody looks and they want those headlines. And last thing you want is a muted four-minute ovation or a subdued five-minute ovation.

11:21You want enthusiastic 12-minute ovation. Emotional ovation. Yeah. You want the word emotion and prolonged. There was an interview I found with Pete Docter and Variety when they were talking about the premiere of Elemental at Cannes. They said to him, did you look at the reviews at Cannes? And this is what Pete Docter said. That was a confusing half hour for us. The film played, we got a seven minute ovation, and you could feel the love beaming down from the audience to the director. They really responded to it. Then the embargo lifted, and some of the reviews were pretty nasty. And it's the same people in the room.

11:55Well, certainly it's the same outlets. Well, but it's not the same people. No, because they saw it earlier in the day. Yeah, it's the party people and the ones that are awards pundits and those people are in the room and the critics are seeing it without an audience sometimes at 7 a.m you know very different setting and that's so they evaluate the movie and not the hoopla yeah i mean i noticed this because i live in london and i go to the london film festival quite often and during the actor strike when you couldn't have the major names but then you did have a lot of indie films especially local indie films that where they did have the names not so much ovation but just the applause you're you're applauding the people in the room.

12:33And so if there aren't the people in the room, it's very muted. But if there is someone who just seems to be the pinnacle of their life so far and their life's work, you just want to clap them. Or they're old and they're about, you know, this will be the last time they're there or they're a big star like The Rock or someone like that. Yeah. So basically, if it's their first or last, you're going to clap them in or out and that's it. But when you're talking about the different outlets, one of the things I do, whenever I collect data on something, especially something unusual like this, I've got to familiarize myself with what I'm measuring.

13:01And then I got to take a view as to whether I'm actually can say anything or whether it's just noise. And I noticed that when I found films that had their ovation reported by the Penske trio, when it was like Hollywood and Variety and Deadline, they actually gave different numbers for the same event, the same physical event. Yeah, that's because it's bullshit. It's all bullshit. First, I will say that the film festivals are complicit here. They like it because if you look at this holistically, the film festivals want stars. They need those stars to be in the room. If you're Terry Fremo at Cannes, if you're Cameron Bailey at Toronto, the currency in the real world of these festivals is the stars.

13:39How do you get the stars there? Well, they need to be perceived as supporting their movie. And if the ovation is going to be larger with the star in the room, then by all means, measure the ovations because that gives the incentive for the star to be there, which the festival's like. So even if it's silly, they like it. After I did the research, I got back to Tricia and said, hey, I found out the answer to what your question was, but what's your opinion? And one of the things she said, which I love, was that we know that there's a high proportion of filmmakers and collaborators in the room and it doesn't really, you know, I'm not sure about measuring it.

14:13But then she said, but I do love anything that hypes up cinema. We could use the buzz. And so I think that tends to be on the film festival side. They're like, why not? Go for it. It's lovely. It's nice for people. Like you said, it's useful. they're not the ones tracking the numbers. It's like everyone's playing their role, aren't they? Yeah, they're all in on it. It's all a joke.

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15:11This episode is brought to you by Accenture. When your advertising operations fall out of sync, campaigns slow down, insights get buried, and opportunities get missed. That's why Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales. Using automation, analytics, and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business. The result? Less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. To learn more, check out Accenture.com slash Spotify. Okay, so let's look at the outlets because you actually compiled data on the average reported length of standing ovations at festivals.

15:54This is from 2000 to 24 among Hollywood Reporter, Variety, and Deadline. Which outlet hypes the most? See, you're using the word hypes. I'm going to be very independent on this one. What I can say is that Hollywood Reporter and Variety almost always agree, give or take, but Deadline was like an average almost two minutes longer. So the average across Hollywood Reporter and Variety was 7 and 7.4 minutes. Oh, so 7.7 and 7.4. So Hollywood reports are 7.4. Variety was 7. So fairly similar. This is when they were all tracking the same event on average. But then deadline was almost nine minutes. So it's almost two minutes longer.

16:32How embarrassing. No, no, no. Before you say this, before you jump on them, I spoke to someone at deadline, off the record, so I can't say who, but I did spoke to someone and I said, look, this is what I found. And he or she said, we measure from the beginning of the credits. The others two measure from the end of the credits. I don't know if that's true or not, but I would say that in a straight face, that's what they told me. But this is funny because Deadline is famously blowjobby in their coverage of everything. And of course, why not just do it to have the biggest number? Because you know what?

17:05The biggest number is going to get you aggregated more and it's going to get you on drudge. And the whole thing is a cynical traffic play. Now, I want to be very clear. You said that. You're using my data and I'm not saying you're misreading the data. But let's... Yeah, but the data is there. And you are the expert. And I'm interpreting that data to say that. No, no, you're not wrong. You're not wrong on that one. But the thing is, the whole of the film industry is an industry of storytellers telling stories about how they tell stories. So why would this not be completely what we'd expect to have?

17:35No, the history of Hollywood is a history of marketing. It's a marketing industry. And this is marketing. So let's get to the question of, does any of this matter? Right? So what does the data tell you about the correlation between these ovations and eventual performance of these movies, whether via the critics or even box office? That was the core question that got me onto it. And I looked at all the different variations. And there is a very slight correlation with IMDB score, but then that's not surprising and it's not useful. On everything else, it's just zero. Like, honestly, on average, it has absolutely no correlation with any outcome.

18:16That's whether it's picked up, whether it's distributed, what platforms, whether it gets reviews, critics. I couldn't find anything that it actually measures other than coverage. And even then, I mean, Cameron Bailey talked about that in this year's festival, the film, I think it was at Palestine, I can't remember what it was, it had the longest evasion this year. And then the next day, it had almost no reviews even. And it hasn't had a chance to get out there. So we don't know how it will perform. Oh, this was the Palestinian movie? I mean, obviously, though, the people in the room for that kind of a movie are going to clap to endorse that kind of a movie.

18:49Yeah, that's it. So we can't say that it's useful in any sense to be like, oh, here's an indicator because it's longer than this. It's like going to go on to do X, Y, Z. You can't do that. I will just say, though, like Devil's Advocate, you say the longest recorded standing ovation at any of the film festivals was Fahrenheit 9-11 at Cannes. And that was a 25-minute ovation. Fahrenheit 9-11 then went on to become the highest grossing documentary of all time. You're right, but the plurals of anecdote is not data. So just because it does align sometimes and it doesn't with others, it just basically means it's not useful.

19:27We can't take the number. Let's say it happens tomorrow. We can't take that number and be like, ah, now we should adjust our predictions on the Oscar race, or we should pick up that film or not. Like that just doesn't, there's no information there. It's just a fun story. No, perfect example is what happened in Venice with The Smashing Machine, which was the big, you know, serious acting debut of The Rock, Dwayne Johnson. Got a gigantic ovation there. He cried. It was a very emotional moment. The movie comes out, the reviews are fine, and it tanks the box office. Yeah, because they're unconnected events almost.

20:03You know, and I have this with friends of mine that are like, you know, why did this film win the Oscar? And I was like, well, because you're thinking of the Oscars as awarding the best film. It's not. The winner of the Oscar is the person that got the most votes from the Oscar voters. That's all it tells you. It doesn't tell you anything else necessarily. In the same way that the best films are not necessarily Oscar winners, in the same way that our politicians aren't the best human beings. Like, it's just not measuring that. Yeah. Parasite got a nine-minute ovation in 2019. went on to win Best Picture and was a huge hit.

20:33Yeah. And it's funny because what it is actually producing is like eating its own tail. What it's producing is articles. And so what I did was I went back, after you kindly shared the article and shared the link and we started chatting, I was like, okay, you know what? I'm going to go back and see if I can find out something that's a bit more tailored to what you want to do. So I got a follow-up piece that'll come out when this episode goes out. And so I looked at about 2 ,000 articles in the trade press that had mentioned the innovation at any point. And then I looked at how many were like, the main focus of the article.

21:02My criteria was, if the ovation hadn't happened, would the article happen? So if it's charting like, here is the film that's in the Oscar race, by the way, it had an ovation, no, article would still exist. But if it was like nine minute ovation, there's the story. And so over the last 20 years, how many articles, guess a number, how many articles are pure, there was an ovation, and this is how long it was, would not have existed without the clapping? A hundred? I don't know. Two hundred. Two hundred. 200 trade press articles. Just Penske trades? Are you including Screen International? Yeah, I did the three Penske and then Screen as well.

21:39And obviously, there are then follow-on pieces where people talk about it. And then it also comes into like a wider piece. Sometimes people might, it might not be about the ovation, but it may have created a buzz that they want to write about it. And it becomes the news hook. The other articles will include it as a evidence point for why a movie was well-received. The movie, which received a 22-minute standing ovation, they can. Which festival generates the most standing ovations? The longest ovations is Venice. People don't realize that. Venice is a lot more inside, I think. And it's obviously, they all have their own personality.

22:13TIFF is a lot more for anyone. I think Berlin really represents European film, whereas I think Venice, for me, is like art, art film. I don't know quite how to describe it, but drama, drama. It's a huge pain in the ass. You got to really want to be there. It's really expensive. Yeah, art. That's what I said. And Sundance, you know, is more of the people, but not really when you're in a ski resort at the height of ski season and it's five grand for a pass. Right. And also it's not, it's not right at the start of awards season. Venice, I feel like people know that if you give it a big ovation, it's likely going to help it in the Oscar race.

22:49Yeah, you feel like you're part of something. And I think that's something that's so interesting. And there were examples where people were talking about like, oh, this had a huge ovation. And then later on somebody, like there was one for the Paperboy, which is the Lee Daniels film like 10 years ago. And it had a 15 minute ovation, all that stuff. When the film came out in the UK, like a year later, Robbie Collin from the Daily Telegraph said he'd read that on the Wikipedia page, it had like this long ovation. But for him who's in the room, he was like, it was more like a cacophony of jeering and squawking and mooing.